Category Archives: Transportation

Suggestion to Manufacture High-Speed Rail Cars in Fremont

Last December, Quentin Kopp floated the idea of the NUMMI plant being re-purposed as a manufacturing facility for high-speed rail cars.  I think this is an excellent idea, the kind of idea that our City should be pursuing.  Yet the City was silent when this idea was raised.

I have vigorously argued that we need to maintain this area a job-producing site, specifically middle-class living-wage jobs as was provided by the NUMMI facility.  Between housing, retail and jobs, the latter is the most important item that we need to turn our City’s economy around.

Read the rest of this entry

Is Light Rail in Fremont a Possiblity?

There has been a lot of discussion recently on the Tri-City Beat about bringing light rail to Fremont.  This is a topic about which I’ve thought a lot.  My passion for promoting high quality public transportation is what led me to study city planning and transportation engineering at U.C. Berkeley.  While I remain a strong advocate for transit, I learned a number of things that tempered my idealism about light rail.

One of the most famous articles on light rail usage is called “A Desire Named Streetcar” written by Don Pickrell in 1992.  Pickrell studied a number of light rail systems that had been built in the 70’s and 80’s and determined that light rail consistently had fewer riders and cost more than originally predicted.  Other studies validated Pickrell’s results.

Read the rest of this entry